Back From the Brink

These women had months, years when they felt their lives were totally out of control, and they were unable to imagine escaping what pulled them down. And yet their determination never fully waned. Here's how three women walked the long, hard road out of despair and finally became free.

For Judy Murphy, much of the past is a fog. But some vivid, painful memories pierce through. The day her son's kindergarten teacher told her he often hid under his desk, too miserable and frightened to play. The day she bought a tent, pitched it in a park in her town, and moved in with her two young daughters because she was sick of crashing with friends or getting kicked out of apartments. And worst of all, the day a judge sentenced her to two months in jail, and Judy lost custody of her children.

"I couldn't run from the pain anymore," she says. "All I could think was, What have I done to my kids?"

For a decade, Judy was addicted to methamphetamine, the powerful, ruinous stimulant also called meth, or crank. She first snorted it when she was 23, an unmarried high school dropout on welfare with a 3-year-old son, Dustin. With the drug, she felt happy, attractive, and capable of achieving anything. Soon she was injecting the drug daily. She knows it sounds crazy now, but back then Judy believed to her core that using meth was the first thing she'd ever done right. "I had this sense of ease," she says. "I had energy. I wasn't hungry, and I'd always had a problem with my weight. I had friends, good people who gave me meth because they loved me. It seemed to be the solution to all my problems."

She eventually started selling the drug, which fueled her habit and delusions. She had grown up poor; it felt glorious to be able to lavish toys and clothes on Dustin. "I had money," she says. "I thought, Hey, I'm a good mom!"

But others weren't fooled. Dustin's kindergarten teacher was the first to recognize the ravages of addiction in the jittery mom and her cowering boy and gently called Judy on it: "Is there something I can do to help you out?"

Judy remembers the moment: "I was so ashamed of myself and so sad for my son. I had the same hopes and dreams for him that every mom has. I loved him with all my heart. So I decided I was going to quit."

She tried—so many times over the next eight years she lost track. Her family had her committed to treatment centers, but she bounced from one program to the next, eventually giving up or getting tossed. She also repeatedly attempted to stop on her own. "The withdrawal was horrific," she says. "I'd sleep 24 to 48 hours at a time. I'd wake up, and my hands and feet would be numb and my brain was completely fuzzy. The worst would pass in a few days. I'd feel good, and I'd think, I've got it down pat. But then I'd look at my life and feel bad. That's the real pain when you're an addict: Using hurts, but reality hurts worse."

When Dustin was 9, Judy got pregnant. She shot up all nine months, terrified she would harm the baby but unable to stop. "I would cry when I was sticking the needle in my arm. I just hated myself for it. I asked God to help me die," Judy says. She gave birth to a healthy girl. Within a year, she was pregnant again, and the same thing happened.

Judy's life continued to spin out of control. She began shoplifting, occasionally food for the kids but more often cigarettes or cordless phones she sold for cash to buy meth. Dustin, 12 by now, grew so disgusted with her that he moved in with Judy's brother. More than once, Judy asked relatives to take care of her girls too. But she missed them terribly and each time took them back within a few days. They moved constantly — to friends' homes, crummy apartments, and for a while, the tent in the park.

Judy got arrested three times for theft. The third time, she was sentenced to four weekends in jail. She slept through the first weekend, nearly comatose from withdrawal. The next weekend, she smuggled in drugs and needles and got high in her cell. The third weekend, she failed to show up. A warrant went out for her arrest.

As a result, a week before Christmas in 1994, a judge sentenced Judy to 60 days in jail, a treatment program, and community service cleaning a landfill. Judy could handle that, but not what came next: Her daughters, 4 1/2 and 3, were removed from her custody. "I was devastated," she says. "I didn't think there was any hope."

Judy knew she had to straighten out or she'd never get her kids back. For the first time, she buckled down and finally took treatment seriously. The treatment center required her to join a 12-step program. She attended meetings religiously, sobbed her heart out, and let women who were already well down the road of recovery cheer her on. She relapsed three times over the next nine months, but no longer got pleasure from a binge. "I was terrified I wouldn't make it," says Judy. But her friends in recovery insisted she would make it, and their faith inspired her to stick with it: She's been clean and sober since September 22, 1995.

In her first year of recovery, Judy had a series of jobs — factory work, waitressing, telemarketing — but dreamed of something more. "I wanted to do something that gave my life meaning," she says. "The women in recovery I was hanging around with — the women I admired — had jobs helping people. I wanted to do that too, so they said, 'Go to school.'"

Judy had gotten her GED during one of her earlier attempts to get clean. Now she enrolled in college, living on student loans. She started working in a women's crisis center and joined a county task force on drug-abusing women and their children. One day, someone suggested that she organize a support group for meth-addicted mothers. Judy had gotten her daughters back by then (and would later mend her relationship with her son too), and she loved the idea of helping women deal with custody, the courts, and their own demons. "I felt blessed to make it out of the hell I lived in so long," she says. "I knew lots of people could feel as good as I now did."

Judy tacked up posters advertising the support group around town. Four women came to the first meeting, on July 9, 1999. As that group grew and the original members thrived, word spread about Moms Off Meth. New groups sprouted around Iowa, then Nebraska, Minnesota, and Washington, helping countless other women turn their lives around.

After graduating from college, Judy went to work as a social worker at the Iowa Department of Human Services, in the very office that had removed her kids from her care — and in doing so, saved her life. Now she's a meth specialist for the department, doing outreach and counseling in 14 counties. She sees meth addicts everywhere, and it stirs a complicated mix of emotions. "I feel sadness and frustration," Judy says. "But I feel a lot of hope, a whole lot of hope, because I know recovery is possible."

Judy will never say she's happy she endured what she did, and to this day she cries when she talks about the anguish she put her kids through. But she savors each day and knows her struggles helped bring her to this point. "I think my past was a gift from God," Judy says. "And the work I do is a gift back to God. My children and I, we have a great life. I don't know if I would have been so grateful for my life if I hadn't had all that pain and suffering."

For more information on Moms Off Meth, go to momsoffmeth.com. The site is Iowa-specific, but you can connect with members from across the country on the site's message boards.

"I had to rebuild from nothing after my divorce."

-- Bonnie Marcus, 43, Mt. Laurel, NJ

Bonnie Marcus was raised by a single mom who told her, "Find a man who'll take care of you." And when she dropped out of college to marry, Bonnie thought she had: Her husband had a good, stable job in merchandising. Bonnie worked until her son was born, then became a stay-at-home mom. The couple bought a four-bedroom house with a large wooded backyard. When their son was 3, they had a second child, a girl. "It was a dream," Bonnie says.

But a few months after her daughter's birth, Bonnie's husband got laid off, and the family's finances collapsed. The couple fought, and the relationship disintegrated, but for two years Bonnie hung on — life on her own seemed unthinkable. Finally, things got so bad that staying together seemed even worse.

Nevertheless, the split crushed Bonnie. "I felt like I lost everything," she says. "He'd been my best friend. I was really sad and angry — I felt like nobody."

After the divorce, Bonnie stayed in the house and got a part-time job but couldn't make ends meet. She missed mortgage payments and faced foreclosure. She lay awake nights, terrified that she and the kids would wind up on the streets. She went on food stamps and Medicaid, filed for bankruptcy, and got a full-time job. But she still couldn't pay the bills — she simply felt more overwhelmed. "I had to juggle the kids and get them off to school every morning; I was always 10 minutes late for work," she remembers. "I was so scared I had pains in my stomach."

For a long time, Bonnie kept her problems to herself. But the more desperate she grew, the more she confided in friends, relatives, neighbors, even people she hardly knew. "I was in a hole in the ground, really deep," she says. "And I was reaching out my hands to anyone who would help." Neighbors gave her their kids' old clothes and toys. The mom of her daughter's friend watched her kids after school for free. Later, parents of another of her daughter's friends made her car payments for four months.

One day, Bonnie went to the YMCA to ask about low-cost child care and discovered the Women's Opportunity Center, an employment-assistance program. Soon, Bonnie was soaking up every service the center offered. She got help writing a résumé. She received donated suits for job interviews. She attended workshops on self-esteem, managing debt, and spreading your wings. Slowly, Bonnie gained the confidence to spread her wings, deciding to go back to college and become a teacher.

Each day, she got the kids off to school in the morning, raced to campus, took a full day of classes, then zoomed home. She cooked dinner, helped the kids with their homework, and then started her own. On weekends, the kids went to their dad's, and Bonnie studied, wrote papers, did laundry, and went grocery shopping. To help pay the bills, she worked as a teacher's aide, did private tutoring, and babysat. "I was like a tornado," she says.

Many days, it all seemed like too much. "I felt overwhelmed all the time — while at work, while at home, while at college. I was stressed and scared and uncertain about my future," Bonnie says. But giving up was not an option. "All my sadness and anger — if I had any anger — went into pushing myself to finish school," she says. "My favorite song through all this was 'I Will Survive.'"

Bonnie did more than survive — she shined. She made dean's list, graduated magna cum laude — and kept going. Last year, she received her master of arts in teaching. Now she's taking courses to earn a special-education certificate while working two jobs: doing training and marketing for a social-skills program for autistic children and working as a teacher for a smoking-prevention program. Between her salary and child-support payments, Bonnie is getting by. But she has more than $30,000 in student loans to repay and is struggling to rebuild her credit.

Still, she knows she's come far — far enough to be able to offer her hand to others stuck in a hole. That's why she's establishing a college scholarship fund for single mothers. "I saw all the help people gave me when I was alone and really, really scared, and it gives me satisfaction to give other people reassurance," Bonnie says.

Bonnie's own example is, perhaps, the best reassurance she can offer. She often runs classes for low-income women and loves to begin by waving her Medicaid card from 1994. Students gasp. "They say, 'You were in that situation?' They don't believe it," Bonnie says. "Here I am, all dressed up and working. And then I tell them, 'Yes, I did it, and so can you.'"

Bonnie got help from the Women's Opportunity Center (WOC) in Mt. Laurel, NJ (856-234-6200, woc-bc.org). To find a similar organization near you, contact Women Work! (800-235-2732, womenwork.org). If you'd like to donate to the scholarship fund Bonnie is creating or just make a general contribution, contact Cathi Rendfrey at the WOC.

It was an evening like any other for Pauline Lewis: eat dinner, scarf down a package of cookies, dash to the bathroom, and throw up. But this time, she fainted and hit her head hard on a cabinet. Her husband, Drew, came home from work to find her on the floor, unconscious. In the emergency room, Pauline had her "come-to-Jesus moment."

"I knew my eating disorder was going to kill me if I didn't do something about it seriously," Pauline says.

Pauline was 31 then and had been bulimic since freshman year of college, when she'd gone home for winter break, stepped on a scale, and saw she'd gained 15 pounds. "That freaked me out completely," she recalls.

Pauline had another unnerving realization: Her parents and two younger sisters, with whom she'd always been close, hadn't simply frozen their existence in her absence. "My room had been converted into a guest room. I'd been thinking I would go back to a cocoon of family and I realized they went on without me."

Back at school, Pauline began the binge-purge routine that would haunt her for years. "Throwing up gave me this overwhelming sense of relief," she says. "Until I purged, I felt like a trapped animal — I had to find a bathroom right away to get rid of this yucky thing inside me."

Nobody ever guessed Pauline's secret, even when she was throwing up four to six times a day. She put on a flawless front — she laughed easily, exuded confidence, and got top grades. "It was like leading two lives," she says. "One was this outgoing, happy, responsible individual who was always smiling. The other person was always hiding, running into bathrooms."

The public Pauline thrived. She graduated and moved to Asia with Drew, her college sweetheart. She worked in market research, got promotions and ever more challenging assignments for bigger and bigger corporate names.

But the private Pauline was crumbling. "It was exhausting, having to maintain this aura of being someone I really wasn't," she says. Her teeth began to rot; she would eventually have four teeth pulled and replaced and four root canals, racking up over $15,000 in dental bills.

In 1996, Pauline and Drew returned to the United States and got married. Two years later, she finally confessed to Drew. "It was such a huge relief," she says. "I was ready to lean on someone else and get help. And for the first time, I made an honest attempt to get therapy."

In therapy, she realized that corporate success was her parents' dream, not hers. So when Drew got a job in another state, Pauline took a break from work to concentrate on getting well. She'd managed to get down to throwing up just once a day. "I was so proud of myself," she says. "But I still needed it somehow." Shortly after their move, Drew found Pauline unconscious in the bathroom.

The incident shook her profoundly. "I really needed to think about who I was," she says. She took a low-stress job as an administrative assistant and mulled the idea of starting a company. To clear her head, she slipped on a backpack and sneakers and went to Vietnam for a month. In Ninh Binh village, outside Hanoi, she visited a women's sewing cooperative. As Pauline sat in a circle of embroiderers, she felt a sense of peace and a flutter of excitement. "Something sparked in me," she says. "I knew I wanted to work with these women."

Back home, Pauline took classes at her local women's business center and drafted a plan to import handbags. She returned to Vietnam and looked at bags by the thousands, until a brightly colored silk-and-leather purse in a shop window caught her eye. Pauline wooed the store's owner, Le Thi Hong Tu, to create an exclusive line for the United States. "She thought I was one crazy woman," Pauline says.

But she had never felt saner. In 2004, Pauline's company, oovoodesign, started selling handbags designed by Hong Tu and sewn by women in Vietnam. The company now supplies more than 500 stores across the United States. And the same year she launched her company, Pauline purged for the last time.

"It's weird to say this, but I don't need to throw up anymore," says Pauline. "The company has given me the sense of fulfillment I was looking for. It saved my life."

Pauline got help from the Women's Business Center of Northern Virginia (703-778-9922, wbcnova.org) and from the eating disorders website somethingfishy.org. You can also contact the National Eating Disorders Association Helpline (800-931-2237, edap.org).